Nokia Lumia 900 With Its Large Display

This is what you get with the Nokia Lumia 900. Note that the large black display appears to be on the surface of the phone rather than recessed. The camera is at the top left, and the buttons that control screen selection are on the bottom.

The standard opening menu of the Windows Phone 7.5 OS is customized with an AT&T app that shows details of your account. You can scroll the screen vertically. To move to the main menu, touch the little arrow at the top right.

Here’s the camera with the much hyped Carl Zeiss optics. Next to it is a dual-LED flash. There’s a menu item for camera settings, but it didn’t really do much.

I propped the camera on my Swiss army knife so you could see the unlabeled controls. They are, from left to right, the camera button, the power switch, and the volume and ringer controls. AT&T provides a handy sticker on the back of the phone when you get it so you can identify these.

Here is a top view of the Lumia 900. On the left the faint oval is the outline of the micro-SIM tray. You open it by sticking the SIM tray tool into the hole, but a paper clip works fine. In the middle is the USB Charging port, then the microphone and the headphone connector.

The perforated oval on the bottom of the phone is the speaker. Everything else is either a compliance symbol or a note that says the phone is made in Korea.

The left side of the phone is plain. All of the controls are on the other side.

This is the phone’s main menu. When you touch that little arrow in the upper right of the opening screen, this is what you get. You can scroll vertically, and all of the apps on the phone are listed here.

If you press the magnifying glass icon on the bottom right of the phone, you get to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. If you touch the text box, you’ll get a keyboard.

Note that the screen does not rotate to match the orientation. However, screen rotation does happen once you open an app.

These test photos were taken from three cameras. The Nikon D70 is on the left, the BlackBerry Bold 990 in the middle, and the Lumia 900 on the right. Note that the Lumia 900 has a significant amount of flare, in spite of the fact that the sun is nearly at right angles from the lens on the phone. The BlackBerry has some color shift, but no flare. The resolution makes no obvious difference.

The dandelion flower should have been an easy test for the macro capability of the Carl Zeiss lens. But notice how the image became oversaturated and bloomed in the photo. The BlackBerry doesn’t have a macro setting, but the photo came out fine, and the Nikon delivered a nearly perfect photo, despite only having 6 megapixels.